This study explores the role of labour market discrimination in determining
occupational distributions of men and women in Europe. Using data from the
eighth wave (2001) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), the
paper documents the degree of occupational segregation in a sample of three
Western European countries with different occupational sex segregation regimes,
Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom (UK). The paper then presents a
simple model of occupational attainment with gender, education, age, main
activity of the employer, and the number of children in the household as
predictors. The effects of gender on the probability of working in an occupation,
controlling for other personal characteristics, are estimated and compared across
categories and across countries. Finally, to determine the role of labour market
discrimination in assigning men and women to different occupations the “Blinder-
Oaxaca” decomposition technique is applied to the determinants of the probability
of working in an occupation.
Labour market discrimination appears to play the largest role in Germany,
though the overall degree of discrimination does not vary substantially across the
three countries. The levels of discrimination differ across occupations, however.
Of the three studied countries, Germany shows the highest levels of discrimination
in managerial occupations, sales/services, plant and machine operators, and
elementary occupations, whereas the UK does in professional occupations,
“technicians and associate professionals”, and crafts/trades workers, while
Denmark does in clerical occupations. Thus, it appears that in a country with a
substantive commitment to gender equality (Denmark), men and women tend to
be employed in separate occupational categories, but the differences in the
probabilities of working in these occupations are largely due to the differences in
personal characteristics, with the exception of managerial and clerical categories,
where discrimination levels are higher. In the traditional family-centred country
(Germany), on the other hand, women and men are treated very differently on the
labour market, while the degree of segregation is lower than that in the
substantively-egalitarian country. Yet, this is not to suggest that in heavily
segregated labour markets men and women are separate but equal. On the
contrary, highly female-dominated clerical occupations and male-dominated
plant/machine operators have high discrimination levels in all three countries.

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This conference paper is also available at: http://epunet.essex.ac.uk/Conf2006/papers/Chzhen_paper.pdf